Our oceans are in trouble and so are we. That's the message from Sylvia Earle, keynote speaker Wednesday morning at the Blue Ocean Film Festival and Conservation Event in Monterey.

The good news, she said, is that new technology can raise our awareness, enhance our exploration and improve our ability to act — without ever getting our feet wet.

"The actions we take in the next 10 years will affect the planet for the next 10,000 years," Earle told a packed room of scientists, filmmakers, engineers, educators, divers and artists gathered at the Portola Hotel & Spa for the weeklong meeting dedicated to creating ocean awareness through media, science and research.

As terrestrials, she said, our roots are deep, but not as deep as the creatures of the sea, and this is the time to turn things around.

"It's taken billions of years to make this a hospitable planet," said Earle, an oceanographer and conservationist. "It's taken a frighteningly short time to move things in the other direction."

Perhaps no one knows that better than Earle. Dubbed "Her Deepness" by the New York Times, her lifelong ocean conservation work includes leading the first team of women argonauts, holding the chief scientist position at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and, currently, being a National Geographic explorer-in-residence.

The U.S. has put millions of dollars into the exploration of a red planet, Mars, but has neglected its own "blue backyard," she said.

The undersea world of Earle's childhood was quite different from the ocean of today. Global warming, acidification, pollution from plastic and toxins have chronically harmed the health of the water.

But Earle called ignorance the biggest threat to the ocean's well-being, and said she found hope for the future with innovative technologies that transform scientists' ability to see what's under the water. For the last three years, she has worked with Google Earth to create maps that show "there's more than just rocks and water down there."

So far, it's only been scientists talking to scientists, said professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, director of the Global Change Institute at The University of Queensland, Australia. The institute is a partner in the Catlin Seaview Survey for the Google Oceans Project, which plans to create a comprehensive map of the territory beneath the sea.

Hoegh-Guldberg, who said exploring the ocean is like discovering the Amazon's rainforest for the first time, said solving the ocean's problems requires public awareness. With a camera that uses three wide-angle lenses designed to take thousands of continuous high-resolution images during each dive, the mapping project is making it so that the push of a computer button at home can make anyone's armchair the start of a diving adventure.

The images can also act as a reference library or help far-flung researchers collaborate without leaving their labs, he said.

Most important, Hoegh-Guldberg believes, is that the technology will get more people to take positive action toward the ocean.

"Now we're beginning to understand that a living ocean keeps us alive and we have to return the favor," Earle said.

Above all, Earle asked the scientists, storytellers and artists at the meeting to use their talents to make sure the next generation could look back and say "thank you" for their ocean legacy.

HSH Prince Albert II of Monaco was a special guest at a Wednesday evening panel that discussed progress to sustain a healthy ocean. Other panelists included Earle; Greg Stone, senior vice president for marine conservation and chief scientist for oceans with Conservation International; Celine Cousteau; and Jane Lubchenco, undersecretary of commerce for oceans and atmosphere and administrator of NOAA.